Smart watches from Apple, Samsung, Google |
Why fit watches do not make us fit
Fitness, health, relaxation, security: a better life. Hardly any other product promises as much as a smartwatch. The watches that Apple, Samsung and from this week also Google Selling as accessories for your mobile phones, according to advertising, must make everything better.
In reality (surprise!) almost none of these promises are kept. It can still be a bad joke that a sports watch doesn’t make its wearer fitter just by wearing it.
But at the latest with the promised health features, the fun is over. For example, heart rate and ECG sensors are designed to monitor heart health. In fact, devices from Apple, Fitbit or Withings can only detect a few very specific diseases, and not even particularly reliably.
An American study concludes that more than 90 percent of patients who were sent to a cardiologist by their Apple Watch were perfectly healthy. Worse still, the watches give their users the feeling that everything is fine if they suffer from any of the medical conditions that are not detected by the respective sensor.
Google’s Pixel Watch promises to be able to provide information about the general state of health through heart rate, temperature and sleep data
Even relaxation only works to a limited extent. Clocks tend to cause me more stress. Because the battery life is too short. How am I supposed to relax if I’m constantly squinting at the battery level and wondering when a charging break fits into my schedule so there’s still enough power left for sleep tracking? In the morning, the game continues in reverse: after a monitored sleep, the clock starts the day with a half-depleted battery.
And woe to you wearing your watch while exercising! The tracking of movement and health data is then intensified, at the same time that the screen no longer turns off and the position is constantly determined via GPS. If you still want to listen to music from the watch and even make phone calls, you don’t have to be a super athlete to run or bike longer than your watch.
Why do we actually make the devices?
On the one hand, they are great toys and prestige objects. More importantly, you support our laziness. You don’t even have to take your cell phone out of your pocket for many tasks. Also, some training sessions are canceled because the battery is no longer sufficient to track properly (and who would go for a run if they couldn’t check their route and heart rate later in the app?).
And of course, realizing that you’ve already walked more than 8,000 steps after a long day at work is the best excuse to sit on the couch instead of on your bike.
Sure, for some users, watches are valuable fitness tools. For most, though, they’re like a monthly gym fee debit: a silent reminder that you really wanted to live a much healthier, more active life, and again we didn’t.
This article comes from BILD am SONNTAG. The ePaper of the entire broadcast is available here.
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